Alpine Activities.org

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Not an early start, but the intent was to be liesurley and stay laterfor some experiements with gear and photos.

The approach was nice and clear!

We just had a big snow dump this week, so the Mt. should be lots of fun!

Nisqually was full of virgin snow...45 inches of it!

It has been a while since I saw the snow piled this high in APRIL!

YEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAW!!!!!!!!!!

Just HERE in the picture...

There is so much fresh POW you can see the track to Camp Muir at 10,000.

Being on a solo trip, I had planned to take the easy route up to the base of my all time favorite play spot. The base of the "Double Razor" . I like to build a snow cave and leave my gear so i can takea few runs without a big pack. Wicked awesome turns! I dream of doing a 360 flip between the two ridges and then another gainer off the second lip... I'll work on that one.

After some digging and sun bathing I made a nice hot lunch of spicey Thai noodles with a phat chicken sandwich and soem chocolate covered mango! MMMMMM ready for a few more turns!

I had enough day light and food in my belly to get up the next ridge and take a few pictures of the view. The wind started picking up around 5:30 pm and I wanted to be back at the car before 7 :00pm.

The view from my snow cave is always pretty awesome!

It looks closer than it really is! I skinned up to the saddle on the right of the cornice. It took about 50 minutes. The wind was blowing about 15 MPH so it took a little longer than usual. The good news was wind at your back for truns on the way down thru the flats!! YEAH!!!!

Up top there the elevation was only 7,000 but the wind was blowing so hard!!!! So I went out to the point at the end of the Cornice to took a few pictures and put my skins away to ski back to the snow cave and collect the rest of my gear, then back to the car.